ARSC T3D Users' Newsletter 17, January 6, 1995

T3D in the News

The following article appeared in the December 23rd issue of the Wall Street Journal:

Cray Research Inc.

Computer Systems Picked By DOE's Los Alamos Lab

Cray Research Inc., Eagan, Minn., said the Department of Energy's Los Alamos National Laboratory has selected its high performance computing systems to ensure the safety and reliability of the U.S. nuclear weapons stockpile.

As a result of the competitive procurement win, a 256-processor CRAY T3D massively parallel processing system and an interim four-processor CRAY Y-MP supercomputer system are scheduled to be installed this month at Los Alamos. In 1995, Los Alamos expects to upgrade the CRAY T3D system to 512 processors and to replace the CRAY Y-MP System with a four-processor version of Cray Research's next-generation parallel vector supercomputer system, code-named Triton, the supercomputer maker said. Financial terms weren't disclosed.

This is a pretty interesting article by itself, but does anyone know who else was part of the "competitive procurement"?

T3D Online Documentation with
docview

Many of the CRI manuals are available, online, with the docview facility. By entering the docview command during an interactive session a user is provided with a menu for listing and searching the available documents. The top level menu looks like:

A quick summary of its capabilities comes from the "help quick" information page obtained by following the above advice.

HELP: Quick Start to Docview
To view or write a passage or an entire document, you must know the
keyword associated with the passage and the name of the document
(docname).
FINDING A TOPIC Syntax: find 'string'
Example: find make
FINDING A DOCUMENT alist or clist commands
VIEWING A PASSAGE Syntax: view 'docname' 'keyword'
Example: view support make
VIEWING A WHOLE Syntax: view 'docname' entire
DOCUMENT Example: view support entire
WRITING TO DISK Syntax: write 'docname' 'keyword' [> 'outfile']
Example: write support awk > tools
Use "entire" as the keyword to write the entire
document to disk. Use "index" as the keyword to
write the document's keywords to disk. The
default for 'outfile' is 'docname'.doc.
GETTING HELP Enter Result
----------- ------------------------------------
h Help about the current command
h 'command' Help about 'command'
h navigate Help about navigational commands
h overview More detailed introduction to Docview

The reason I brought up docview in this newsletter is that several new T3D manuals have been made available through docview recently. The list of online manuals available through docview for the T3D is shown below:

For each document there is a list of keywords for which the find command will return a description. Sometimes you have to list the keywords to know what you are looking for.

If "a picture is worth a thousand words" then docview loses information in 1000 word chunks. Because docview is all ascii text files there is no easy way to reproduce the postscript pictures found in the hard copy manuals.

To get around the first limitation above, I sometimes write the entire document to a file and then all the unix commands like grep and vi can be used to search for information. On our printer the page breaks of the docview file are exactly one line too many, so almost every other page is blank.

For PVM programmers, the pvm.hence.40 document contains some interesting new information and it would be worthwhile to write the entire document to a file and just peruse it with an editor.

Man Page Tricks

As helpful as docview is, there is nothing as pleasing as to find a man page on a new command or function. But the problem of finding the right man page is the same as using a dictionary to check your spelling, you have to know what you're looking for. On top of this, "man" as a unix command is case sensitive (try man abort and man ABORT).

I learned a trick from Dr. Ming Jiang some time ago that might help finding the right man page. There is a file, /usr/man/whatis, that contains a one line description of each man page. The first few lines looks like:

But even beyond this there is the "man -k keyword" command that not only does the egrep on the file /usr/man/whatis but all also egreps the file /usr/man/local/whatis. This file contains the list of man pages added by ARSC for libraries and commands available at ARSC.

Reminders

Phase II I/O on the T3D

ARSC is evaluating the effort of moving from the current Phase I I/O to Phase II I/O on the T3D. In future newsletters I can summarize the differences, but for now I would like to ask if any ARSC users are interested in this upgrade or would want to be part of the evaluation?

List of Differences Between T3D and Y-MP

The current list of differences between the T3D and the Y-MP is:

Data type sizes are not the same (Newsletter #5)

Uninitialized variables are different (Newsletter #6)

The effect of the -a static compiler switch (Newsletter #7)

There is no GETENV on the T3D (Newsletter #8)

Missing routine SMACH on T3D (Newsletter #9)

Different Arithmetics (Newsletter #9)

Different clock granularities for gettimeofday (Newsletter #11)

I encourage users to e-mail in differences that they have found, so we all can benefit from each other's experience.

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